Education may be defined to be the process of developing in due order
and proportion all the good and desirable parts of human nature. On this
point all educators are substantially agreed. Another truth, to which
there is a general theoretical assent, is, that, in the order in which
we develop the faculties, we should follow the leadings of nature,
cultivating in childhood those faculties which seem most naturally to
flourish in childish years, and reserving for maturer years the
cultivation of those faculties which in the order of nature do not show
much vigor until near the age of manhood, and which require for their
full development a general ripening of all the other powers. The
development of a human being is in some respects like that of a plant.
There is one stage of growth suitable for the appearance and maturity of
the leaf, another for the flower, a third for the fruit, and still a
fourth for the perfected and ripened seed.
The analogy has of course many limitations. In the human plant, for
instance, one class of faculties, after maturing, does not disappear in
order to make place for another class, as the flower disappears before
there can be fruit. Nor, again, is any class of faculties wanting
altogether until the season for their development and maturity. The
faculties all exist together--leaf, flower, fruit, and seed--at the same
time, but each has its own best time for ripening.
While these principles have received the general assent of educators,
there has been a wide divergence among them as to some of the practical
applications. Which faculties do most naturally ripen early in life, and
which late in life?
According to my own observation, the latest of the human powers in
maturing, as it is the most consummate, is the Judgment. Next in the
order of maturity, and next also in majesty and excellence, is the
Reasoning power. Reason is minister to the judgment, furnishing to the
latter materials for its action, as all the other powers, memory, fancy,
imagination, and so forth, are ministers to reason, and supply it with
its materials. The reasoning power lacks true vigor and muscle, the
judgment is little to be relied on, until we approach manhood. Nature
withholds from these faculties an earlier development, for the very
reason, apparently, that they can ordinarily have but scanty materials
for action until after the efflorescence of the other faculties. The
mind must first be well filled with knowledge, which the other faculties
have gathered and stored, before reason and judgment can have full scope
for action.
Going to the other end of the scale, I have as little doubt that the
earliest of all the faculties to bud and blossom, is the Memory.
Children not only commit to memory with ease, but they take actual
pleasure in it. Tasks, under which the grown-up man recoils and reels,
the child will assume with light heart, and execute without fatigue.
Committing to memory, which is repulsive drudgery to the man, is the
easiest of all tasks to the child. More than this. The things fixed in
the memory of childhood are seldom forgotten. Things learned later in
life, not only are learned with greater difficulty, but more rapidly
disappear. I recall instantly and without effort, texts of Scripture,
hymns, catechisms, rules of grammar and arithmetic, and scraps of poetry
and of classic authors, with which I became familiar when a boy. But it
is a labor of Hercules for me to repeat by memory anything acquired
since attaining the age of manhood. The Creator seems to have arranged
an order in the natural development of the faculties for this very
purpose, that in childhood and youth we may be chiefly occupied with the
accumulation of materials in our intellectual storehouse. Now to reverse
this process, to occupy the immature mind of childhood chiefly with the
cultivation of faculties which are of later growth, and actually to put
shackles and restraints upon the memory, nicknaming and ridiculing all
memoriter exercises as parrot performances, is to ignore one of the
primary facts of human nature. It is to be wiser than God.
Another faculty that shoots up into full growth in the very morning and
spring-time of life, is Faith. I speak here, of course, not of religious
belief, but of that faculty of the human mind which leads a child to
believe instinctively whatever is told him. That we all do thus believe
until by slow and painful experience we learn to do otherwise, needs no
demonstration. Everybody's experience attests the fact. It is equally
plain that the existence and maturity of this faculty in early childhood
is a most wise and beneficent provision of nature. How slow and tedious
would be the first steps in knowledge, were the child born, as some
teachers seem trying to make him, a sceptic, that is, with a mind which
refuses to receive anything as true, except what it has first proved by
experience and reason! On the contrary, how much is the acquisition of
knowledge expedited, during these years of helplessness and dependency,
by this spontaneous, instinctive faith of childhood. The same infinite
wisdom and love, which in the order of nature provide for the helpless
infant a father and mother to care for it, provide also in the
constitution of the infant's mind that instinctive principle or power of
faith, which alone makes the father's and mother's love efficacious
towards its intellectual growth and development. Of what use were
parents or teachers, in instructing a child which required proof for
every statement that father, mother, or teacher gives? How cruel to
force the confiding young heart into premature scepticism, by compelling
him to hunt up reasons for everything, when he has reasons, to him
all-sufficient, in the fact that father, mother, or teacher told him so?
It may seem trifling to dwell so long upon these elementary points. Yet
there are wide-spread plans of education which violate every principle
here laid down. Educators and systems of education, enjoying the highest
popularity, seem to have adopted the theory, at least they tacitly act
upon the theory, that the first faculty of the mind to be developed is
the Reasoning power. Indeed, they are not far from asserting that the
whole business of education consists in the cultivation of this power,
and they bend accordingly their main energies upon training young
children to go through certain processes of reasoning, so called. They
require a child to prove everything before receiving it as true; to
reason out a rule for himself for every process in arithmetic or
grammar; to demonstrate the multiplication-table before daring to use
it, or to commit it to memory, if indeed they do not forbid entirely its
being committed to memory as too parrot-like and mechanical. To commit
blindly to memory precious forms of truth, which the wise and good have
hived for the use of the race, is poohed at as old-fogyish. To receive
as true anything which the child cannot fathom, and which he has not
discovered or demonstrated for himself, is denounced as slavish. All
authority in teaching, growing out of the age and the reputed wisdom of
the teacher, all faith and reverence in the learner, growing out of a
sense of his ignorance and dependence, are discarded, and the frightened
stripling is continually rapped on the knuckles, if he does not at every
step show the truth of his allegations by what is called a course of
reasoning. Children reason, of course. They should be encouraged and
taught to reason. No teacher, who is wise, will neglect this part of a
child's intellectual powers. But he will not consider this the season
for its main, normal development. He will hold this subject for the
present subordinate to many others. Moreover, the methods of reasoning,
which he does adopt, will be of a peculiar kind, suited to the nature
of childhood, the results being mainly intuitional, rather than the
fruits of formal logic. To oblige a young child to go through a formal
syllogistic statement in every step in elementary arithmetic, for
instance, is simply absurd. It makes nothing plain to a child's mind
which was not plain before. On the contrary, it often makes a muddle of
what had been perfectly clear. What was in the clear sunlight of
intuition, is now in a haze, through the intervening medium of logical
terms and forms, through which he is obliged to look at it.
A primary teacher asks her class this question: "If I can buy 6 marbles
with 1 penny, how many marbles can I buy with 5 pennies?" A bright boy
who should promptly answer "30" would be sharply rebuked. Little
eight-year old Solon on the next bench has been better trained than
that. With stately and solemn enunciation he delivers himself of a
performance somewhat of this sort. "If I can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny,
how many marbles can I buy with 5 pennies? Answer--I can buy 5 times as
many marbles with 5 pennies as I can buy with 1 penny. If, therefore, I
can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny, I can buy 5 times as many marbles with 5
pennies; and 5 times 6 marbles are 30 marbles. Therefore, if I can buy 6
marbles with one penny, I can buy 30 marbles with 5 pennies."
And this is termed reasoning! And to train children, by forced and
artificial processes, to go through such a rigmarole of words, is
recommended as a means of cultivating their reasoning power and of
improving their power of expression! It is not pretended that children
by such a process become more expert in reckoning. On the contrary,
their movements as ready reckoners are retarded by it. Instead of
learning to jump at once to the conclusion, lightning-like, by a sort of
intuitional process, which is of the very essence of an expert
accountant, they learn laboriously to stay their march by a cumbersome
and confusing circumlocution of words. And the expenditure of time and
toil needed to acquire these formulas of expression, which nine times
out of ten are to those young minds the mere _dicta magistri_, is
justified on the ground that the children, if not learning arithmetic,
are learning to reason.
Let me not be misunderstood. I do not advocate the disuse of
explanations. Let teachers explain, let children give explanations. Let
the rationale of the various processes through which the child goes,
receive a certain amount of attention. But the extreme into which some
are now going, in primary education, is that of giving too much time to
explanation and to theory, and too little to practice. We reverse, too,
the order of nature in this matter. What it now takes weeks and months
to make clear to the immature understanding, is apprehended at a later
day with ease and delight at the very first statement. There is a clear
and consistent philosophy underlying this whole matter. It is simply
this. In the healthy and natural order of development in educating a
young mind, theory should follow practice, not precede it. Children
learn the practice of arithmetic very young. They take to it naturally,
and learn it easily, and become very rapidly expert practical
accountants. But the science of arithmetic is quite another matter, and
should not be forced upon them until a much later stage in their
advancement.
To have a really correct apprehension of the principle of decimal
notation, for instance, to understand that it is purely arbitrary, and
that we might in the same way take any other number than ten as the base
of a numerical scale,--that we might increase for instance by fives, or
eights, or nines, or twelves, just as well as by tens--all this requires
considerable maturity of intellect, and some subtlety of reasoning.
Indeed I doubt whether many of the pretentious sciolists, who insist so
much on young children giving the rationale of everything, have
themselves ever yet made an ultimate analysis of the first step in
arithmetical notation. Many of them would open their eyes were you to
tell them, for instance, that the number of fingers on your two hands
may be just as correctly expressed by the figures 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15,
as by the figures 10,--a truism perfectly familiar to every one
acquainted with the generalizations of higher arithmetic. Yet it is
up-hill work to make the matter quite clear to a beginner. We may wisely
therefore give our children at first an arbitrary rule for notation. We
give them an equally arbitrary rule for addition. They accept these
rules and work upon them, and learn thereby the practical operations of
arithmetic. The theory will follow in due time. When perfectly familiar
with the practice and the forms of arithmetic, and sufficiently mature
in intellect, they awaken gradually and surely, and almost without an
effort, to the beautiful logic which underlies the science.
How do we learn language in childhood? Is it not solely on authority
and by example? A child who lives in a family where no language is used
but that which is logically and grammatically correct, will learn to
speak with logical and grammatical correctness long before it is able to
give any account of the processes of its own mind in the matter, or
indeed to understand those processes when explained by others. In other
words, practice in language precedes theory. It should do so in other
things. The parent who should take measures to prevent a child from
speaking its mother tongue, except just so far and so fast as it could
understand and explain the subtle logic which underlies all language,
would be quite as wise as the teacher who refuses to let a child become
expert in practical reckoning, until it can understand and explain at
every step the rationale of the process,--who will not suffer a child to
learn the multiplication table until it has mastered the metaphysics of
the science of numbers, and can explain with the formalities of
syllogism exactly how and why seven times nine make sixty-three.
These illustrations have carried me a little, perhaps, from my subject.
But they seemed necessary to show that I am not beating the air. I have
feared lest, in our very best schools, in the rebound from the exploded
errors of the old system, we have unconsciously run into an error in the
opposite extreme.
My positions on the particular point now under consideration may be
summed up briefly, as follows: